Recently I purchased a pro tech toolkit from iFixit. The pro-tech toolkit is designed for tech enthusiasts to have every essential tool they need on hand. It comes with plastic picks for opening devices, tweezers, and a lot more super valuable tools.
image from ifixit.com
It also has a 64-bit screwdriver set for many different kinds of devices. When I recently took apart my Xbox 360 (which you can read about here), it used a special star tip, which the kit had. The kit also has an anti-shock wrist band which I haven’t had a chance to use yet. The only complaint I have so far is that the pressure tweezers broke quite quickly.
My favorite thing about the kit is the screwdriver set which has a lid shaped like a grid for placing screws which has been extremely useful as I don’t have any mat to put the screws on. Overall I really like this kit, and I will definitely be using it in the future, as it is super handy to have on hand! You can check it out by visiting their website here: ifixit.com
Tablet computer with broken glass screen on white background
Recently my iPad (5th gen) was dropped, and it had many cracks on its screen. After about a week of the glass being broken, I looked it up to see if I could order a replacement part to fix it and if it would be worth the price of a claim and the time to replace it. After a bit of googling around, I found out that I could just replace the glass part (the digitizer), and it would be much cheaper than replacing the whole LCD display.
A digitizer is where the screen recognizes touch, and is the outer glass part you interact with the actual LCD was not damaged. I was able to find a replacement part on a site called iFixit. I heard about iFixit from a YouTuber I watch called Hugh Jeffreys. Hugh Jeffreys is an Australian tech enthusiast who repairs devices such as Phones, Tablets, iMacs, etc., and makes short videos on the process. He and several other youtube creators also use iFixit tools for taking apart phones.
iFixit sells parts to many different kinds of devices mainly I was able to find a screen digitizer for my exact iPad model pretty quickly on their site. They also have a pretty active community on almost any device for help on taking apart and fixing. The part I ordered cost me about $50, including the tools necessary for taking apart the iPad.
After the part arrived, I looked at the guide in the item description. Unfourtintly I broke the home button ribbon cable when taking the front display off of the iPad. It was a painful process of heating the iPad adhesive with the heating tool, then attempting to pry it open, and then heating it again. Fourtintly I was able to find a home button replacement on iFixit as well, but that meant that the Touch ID would no longer work due to apple’s “safety concerns.”
After I applied for a screen protector after the completed repair, I bought it off amazon for about $8 for three. The entire repair cost about $70. It would have been cheaper if I hadn’t bought the home button replacement.
Recently I found a YouTuber by the name of “Bro Code” who has published many short coding tutorials on his channel, but the ones that caught my attention was his pretty long videos teaching the basics of different coding languages including HTM (Yes I know HTML isn’t a programming language,) C, and Java. The main one that I have been wanting to learn especially is Javascript since I had already learned some CSS and HTML basics from Codecademy.
Most of his tutorials are about four to twelve hours long, but he has everything timestamped for each subject. So far I am about one hour into his Javascript crash course video and am really enjoying it. His explanations are really useful for beginners. I would definitely recommend watching the courses for beginners:
Recently I got back into 3d printing, and after I set up OctoPi with my Ender-3, the first thing I printed was keycaps for one of the specific characters from a video game called Valorant. Keycaps are the keys that you press on when you type on a mechanical keyboard (click here for a better explanation.) (Valorant is a game I play with my two brothers Nicholas and Simeon).
In valorant, a 5v5 shooter-based game with about twenty characters, each has about four unique abilities that can help them perform in the field and switch from your in-game gun to one of your abilities, you press a key that you set on your keyboard. The keycaps I made are for each one of those abilities.
I found a 3D model keycap for only one character from Valorant on Thingiverse. Still, since there are about 20 different characters and they are constantly adding more characters every couple of months, there aren’t many free keycap 3d model designs for each specific character out there. But after looking up a couple of videos and testing different ideas, I concluded that designing them in software called 3D Builder was the easiest, thanks to this video which introduced me to the program:
And after playing around with the program (which was a lot easier to learn than I thought.) I created keycaps for my brother Simeon and Nicholas, who play different characters than I usually play. For future reference, I found that the following steps were the best for making new keycaps:
STEP 1:
Find the character you want to make the keycaps for on the Valorant fandom page, which you can find here. For example, this is Chamber’s page, then click on one of the pictures of the abilities you want to use, then right-click the image and click “save image as” and call it whatever the name of the power was (tip: create a folder to add all of the files that will be used for making the keycaps just to keep it organized)
Click “Edit” on the top menu bar, then choose “Emboss.” Then click the “Pattern” dropdown button and select “Load” to find the picture of the previously saved characters’ ability that you wanted on the keycap and double click it once opened make sure that the “Bevel” button on the top menu is not selected. And move the image onto the blank top of the keycap and center it, then drag the green double arrow up as high as you want the picture to pop out. Then hit “Emboss.” If you need help, here’s a short video
STEP 4:
Now just press the hamburger menu button on the top left of the app and hit “Save as,” and save as STL, OBJ, or whatever file type you prefer. Then open the 3D model file in your slicer (I use Cura as it is the easiest for me). In Cura, there is a feature called support blocking, which, as the name implies, blocks the 3D printer from printing supports where you want it to. Click the “Support Blocking” button on the left side menu and then press everywhere on the bottom inside of the keycap except for the small cross-section where you attach the keycap to your keyboard, for example, this video:
And that’s it! If you need help in any way, write a comment below this post or contact me via email at the top of this site.
